Yes, the PC used to be my family PC and the tiny 40 GB PATA/IDE HDD is full of important documents and photos. Is there a reason you want to have an Vm instead of dual booting with this pc? Make sure you download and save both sets of drivers *BEFORE* attempting to install Windows.

Otherwise, it looks like Dell already provides all the hardware drivers under XP and Windows 7.

Keep in mind that if you're using a SATA hard drive, you'll need an XP iso pre-patched with extra SATA drivers. XP will still only use 3.5-4GB, but you'll gain noticeable performance under Windows 7, and you'll need that extra RAM for using modern browsers anyway. I'd also recommend checking your Dell's specs to see if the motherboard will allow upgrade to 8GB of RAM. You should just buy a 500GB and partition it into two 250GB partitions for each OS install. If you wanna dual boot, I'd firstly recommend dual booting with an OS that's a little more fit for the hardware (like Win7), but both OSes will need to be installed in Legacy Mode or BIOS/MBR. Unfortunately, it'll probably mean you need to remove Windows 10 if you installed it in UEFI/GPT mode. Add to that, since VMs don't fully utilize native graphics hardware, they generally aren't a good option for gaming. Trying to run a VM under Windows 10 with so few system resources to work with is going to produce a really, really terrible experience bordering unusable. Honestly, this is one of the few times I'd actually recommend a native install over a VM because, quite frankly, this Dell you have shouldn't be running Windows 10.

Any more useful tips and tricks that I'm missing here when it comes to running XP on a VM?.

Adding on to question 4 and question 7, could anybody give links to the software and games that they're talking about?.

Adding on to question 4, could anybody recommend some good old games for XP?.

On my physical PC, should I use Ethernet or Wi-Fi when connecting to the internet on my XP virtual machine? (My PC connects to Wi-Fi via a little USB adapter.).

How would I install all of the updates for XP?.

Besides AntiWPA, what other software should I get?.

Should I get the Home or Professional edition? (Either way, I'm getting a 32-bit SP3 ISO).

What is the storage size I should select?.

Make/Model: Dell OptiPlex 780 Ultra Small Form Factor (USFF)Īnd without further ado, here are my questions: So first and foremost, the virtual machine platform that I want to run my XP virtual machine on is the only one I have experience with, that is VirtualBox.ĬPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 clocking in at 3.0 GHz

How to run xp emulator on windows 10